Category: short stories

The Woman Dies

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The Woman Dies presents 52 pieces of flash fiction by Aoko Matsuda, the author of the short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are. Each of Matsuda’s small but sparkling stories responds to various aspects of pop culture in clever and surprising ways.

Characteristic of Matsuda’s idiosyncratic approach to the flotsam of contemporary culture is “Hawai’i,” which imagines a heaven for clothes that were thrown away because they did not spark joy. The heaven enjoyed by an unworn sweater sounds like a lovely time of relaxing by the pool while, in the sky, “not far from the rainbow, the pair of skinny jeans owned in similar shades was paragliding together with the dress once worn to a friend’s wedding and never again.”

At the same time, the over-the-top language Matsuda uses to describe this paradise hints at how ridiculous it is to ascribe any sort of teleological meaning to consumerist excess. Still, if this is the world we find ourselves in, why not imagine a heaven where even a discarded sweater is allowed to have a happy ending?

While the topics covered in The Woman Dies are varied, many of the stories playfully confront gender issues in popular media. One of the more intriguing of such stories is “The Android Whose Name Was Boy,” which Matsuda writes “evolved from my thoughts about Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a classic sci-fi anime from 1995 that does indeed inspire thoughts about gender. 

The eponymous android, whose name is in fact “Boy,” begins its life by setting out on an adventure. Over the course of the five-page story, it does its best to disrupt narrative conventions regarding young male characters. Challenging and unending though this task might be, “the android whose name is Boy, developed to heal the wounds of those hurt by boys hurt in the past, is on the move once more.”

While “The Android Whose Name Was Boy” is open to a diversity of interpretations, other stories in the collection are overtly feminist. In “The Purest Woman in the Kingdom,” a prince takes it upon himself to seek out a woman who has never been touched by a man. After a great deal of searching, he finally finds and marries one such woman. On their wedding night, she karate chops him into oblivion. This woman has never been touched by a man; and, thanks to her training and skill in martial arts, she never will be. Absolute queen behavior.

Most of the stories in The Woman Dies are relatively lighthearted, but “The Masculine Touch” (by far my favorite piece in the collection) is out for blood. This story flips the script on gender, casting male writers as delicate greenhouse flowers who need to be supported because sometimes – every so often – their work has cultural and economic value. Matsuda doesn’t pull her punches:

The more radical of the male novelists wrote articles about this turn of events for male magazines, declaring this the beginning of the Male Era. They bolstered their arguments with examples of the other times when the masculine touch had effected changes like this one, thus arguing for men’s continued progress in all areas of society.

“The Masculine Touch” responds to a painfully specific way of talking about female writers and artists in Japan, and I imagine that people in other contexts can relate to frustrations regarding how the publishing industry fetishizes “queer writers,” or “writers of color,” or any number of people whose humanity is compressed into marketing-friendly categories.

Unfortunately, other pieces in the collection lack this specificity. Though we’re all familiar with the trope of fridging female characters, the title story, “The Woman Dies,” is a bit too broad to resonate. Though it’s easy to sympathize with the sentiment underlying “The Woman Dies,” readers may find themselves simply shrugging and moving on. Flash fiction tends to be hit or miss, but this collection offers an array of stories to choose from, and it achieves an admirable balance between heavy hitters and palette cleansers.

The Woman Dies is remarkably cohesive as a collection. There’s a lovely rhythm and flow to the stories, and it’s just as entertaining to read the book in one sitting as it is to dip in and out at your leisure. Matsuda’s writing is sharp and self-aware, and she uses brevity as a weapon to puncture the absurdities of gender, media, and modern life. It’s a pleasure to read her work in Polly Barton’s translation, which is quick and lively and showcases an incredible range of tone and style that’s pure literary pop.

Retrograde

Kathryn3 Comments

Retrograde collects five short stories and one novella written by a young Osamu Dazai and gorgeously translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada.

The novella, Das Gemeine, follows a 25yo student studying French literature who aspires to become a writer himself. While hovering around an amazake stand in Ueno Park and hoping to catch the attention of the young woman who works there, the narrator meets another student, a violinist who barely attends class at all. The violinist’s friend, himself a painter, warns the narrator not to believe any of the violinist’s tall tales about his supposed talent.

The three young men decide to start a literary journal together (along with their pathetically unattractive acquaintance Osamu Dazai), but petty personality conflicts crash the project before it can get off the ground. Feeling hopelessly at a loss in letters and in love, the narrator meets a sad fate that may not have been entirely an accident.

One of the many myths surrounding Osamu Dazai (the author, not the character) is that he considered himself to be a failure rejected by the mainstream literary establishment. For better or worse, I can relate. I know from personal experience that, as an outsider, you often find yourself placing your work in the hands of upstart editors organizing projects that may, in all likelihood, never see the light of day. More often than not, things fall apart precisely because the creative team had big dreams but no practical skills to realize their ambitions. 

I myself am something of a coward who immediately walks away from that sort of unpleasantness, but my familiarity with creative collaboration mishaps makes me respect the truth of the story Dazai tells in Das Gemeine, which is remarkably well-observed. The characters in this novella are deeply frustrating and more than a little cringe, but they’re 100% real – this is exactly what it’s like to work with creatives in their twenties who build castles in the air but haven’t yet developed the artistic discipline to commit their visions to paper. Bless their hearts.

The five shorter stories in the collection read like something that the narrator of Das Gemeine might actually have written. A 25yo man dies tragically and is mourned by his beautiful wife. A college student sits for the final exam of a French literature class he never attended. A high school student obnoxiously flirts with café waitresses but swiftly loses a fight with a grown man who’s not interested in his sophomoric bullshit. A teenage boy experiences a sexual awakening when the circus comes to town. Each of these stories is only a few pages long, and their unguarded sincerity contributes to their charm.

The closing story, “Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle,” is about two sisters in love with an idealized version of a man who only exists on paper until the strength of their shared storytelling summons his ghost to appear under their window… perhaps. I appreciate this story’s clever touch of Todorovian fantasy, and I’m always here for unapologetic gothic pathos. This aesthetically luxurious story is classic Dazai, in that it’s exactly the sort of work that’s contributed to his popularity among generations of students. I myself am not immune, of course, and this is by far my favorite piece in the collection.

In their “Translator’s Afterword,” Takada describes Dazai’s writing style as “a casual conversation with someone familiar,” and they explain that they want their translation to feel as if they’re “doing this just for you,” the reader. Takada gets the tone exactly right, rendering Dazai’s straightforward prose into an invitation to sympathize with the writer and his characters even despite their naked sincerity. I’ve never responded to overly “literary” renditions of Dazai’s prose, but I found myself flying through this translation. It’s fantastic.

I also want to highlight the care and attention that One Peace Books has put into the layout and typeset of this book, giving the words on the page exactly the room they need to breathe. Retrograde is a lovely object to hold in your hands, so much so that it might even spark the same youthful enthusiasm for literature that Dazai so aptly captures in his early fiction.

Much love to Leo Elizabeth Takada and One Peace Books for breathing fresh life into these classic stories from the 1930s. Retrograde is an admirable achievement, and I hope it brings the work of a fascinating author to new readers.

She and Her Cat

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She and Her Cat collects four interlinked short stories about women and their cats. Though these stories are bittersweet, their gentleness is a source of comfort and encouragement.

The stories in She and Her Cat were written by Naruki Nakagawa, who’s mainly known as a screenwriter for science fiction anime from the mid 2000s, and the concept is based on the 1999 short indie film (which you can watch on YouTube here) created by the international superstar anime director Makoto Shinkai. I think it’s fair to say that the original short film is a representative example of the iyashikei “comfort” genre of anime, which Patrick Lum describes as “designed to be as comfy and mellow as can be.” This book, which Nakagawa wrote in his late forties, similarly uses young female characters to create a sense of living in a world where a brighter future is always possible.

The first story is a direct adaptation of Shinkai’s original short animation. A young office worker named Miyu brings home a kitten who’s been left outside in the rain in a disintegrating cardboard box. Miyu is growing apart from both her boyfriend and her best friend, and she feels as though she’s no longer able to understand the nuances of other people’s feelings. Thankfully, her new cat Shiro loves her unconditionally, and he’ll always be there for her.

The second story is about an art student who can’t find the motivation to apply to a university-level Fine Arts program, and the third is about an aspiring manga artist who was unable to make her debut and became a hikikomori after the death of her writer, who also happened to be her childhood friend. Both women find the courage to pull themselves out of their depression and take the first few steps forward – with the help of their cats, of course.

In the last story, a childless middle-aged woman finds herself alone after caring for her husband’s parents only to be left by her husband himself. As she gets older, so too does the boss of the neighborhood stray cats, and she ends up adopting him. Around the same time, her nephew has a quiet breakdown at his first job out of college, and the woman ends up sheltering him too. In return, he eagerly learns the non-corporate life skills she shares, and he naturally begins to help her manage the household. While it’s always rewarding to nurture a mutually loving and beneficial relationship with a cat, this story reminds the reader that kindness can exist between humans as well.

The narrative viewpoint of these stories alternates between the cats and their human companions. When the cats aren’t expressing their undying love for the human ladies in their lives, they’re off on their own adventures in the neighborhood, doing as cats do. Even more than the human characters, the cats have strong personalities and know what they’re about.

Comforting Japanese books about cats are currently enjoying a small cultural moment, and She and Her Cat is among the best of them. As you might expect from a book written by a professional screenwriter, each “scene” is fairly short, which makes for a quick and engaging read. Nagakawa maintains the distinctive narrative voice associated with Makoto Shinkai’s films, and Ginny Tapley Takemori conveys this straightforward gentleness perfectly in translation. In the English edition, each story is prefaced by a gorgeous full-page illustration by Rohan Eason, which only adds to the book’s charm. Exactly like the creatures it celebrates, She and Her Cat is light, nimble, and filled with character. 

或るバイトを募集しています

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Aru baito o boshū shite imasu (或るバイトを募集しています) is a collection of eight short horror stories conveyed in the form of documentary-style found footage. Each story is prefaced by a listing for a part-time job that seems a little strange, or perhaps too good to be true.

The most representative of these jobs is a request to make an offering of flowers at a certain empty lot between midnight and 1:00am every night. An aspiring comedian who needs the money and keeps late hours takes the job and carries it out faithfully. He never sees anything strange, but something about the job still feels off.

When he does research about the location, he can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Another entertainment industry professional explains that the job is probably a strategy to lower the land value. The comedian’s employer wants to buy the land and assumes they’ll be able to get it at a steep discount if it becomes known in the neighborhood as a “stigmatized property” (as explained by Business Insider here). 

The comedian does his best not to think about it too hard. When he finally gets a gig and fails to make his nightly offering, he leaves the studio only to find that an unknown number has called several times. When he checks his voicemail, a mysterious woman speaks to him through static, saying, “The flowers from yesterday have withered. Why didn’t you come tonight? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here? Can I still stay here?”

Slightly outdated media and technology are a recurring theme in the collection, and this isn’t the only story about creepy messages left on an answering machine. Other stories revolve around physical media like VHS tapes, DVDs, and handwritten letters. When it comes to creepy found objects, I get the sense that there’s a certain air of uncleanliness that clings to the physical media of a prior century.  

Along with the spookiness of the stories, I enjoyed the rationalizations for why each strange job might exist. If I had to guess, I’d say that this collection is partially inspired by the recent discourse surrounding yami baito, or “shady part-time jobs” (which the BBC did a podcast about here). In real life, yami baito involves organized crime organizations using aboveground job postings on social media to recruit young people for illegal activities such as cash withdrawal fraud and stripping copper wiring from abandoned houses. Still, it’s not too difficult to imagine an entirely different shadow world seeking to prey on the living with the offer of easy money.

More than social commentary, however, Aru baito dwells in the realm of internet creepypasta. The collection’s author, Kurumu Akumu, has spent the past several years sharing short and spooky stories on various platforms, including YouTube (here), Note (here), and Twitter (here). Aru baito reflects the found footage nature of creepypasta by presenting its stories in a variety of formats, such as interviews, screenshots of text conversations, blog comments, and so on. The unusual formatting is a lot of fun, making the book feel like a file folder of cursed printouts.

Kurumu Akumu’s work reminds me of the mockumentary-style horror of Uketsu’s Strange Pictures, but Aru baito has no connecting narrative, nor does it make any attempt at portraying psychological realism. Instead, the reader feels as if they’re encountering real urban legends in the wild, and the lack of context heightens the eerie feeling of looking at something that shouldn’t be seen. Aru baito is an unsettling collection that blends the horror of cursed analog media with the eerie plausibility of urban legends, leaving readers with the lingering sense that some part-time jobs are better left unfilled.

ツミデミック

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Michi Ichiho’s Tsumidemic (ツミデミック), which won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2024, collects six stories about the atmospheric strangeness of the Coronavirus pandemic. While everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere, Ichiho wonders, what sort of intriguingly antisocial behavior might have been enabled by isolation?

The opening story, Chigau hane no tori (違う羽の鳥), has all the grim fascination of a viral urban legend. Yūto moved to Tokyo only to drop out of college, and now he works as a barker for a bar in Shinjuku. Unfortunately, business isn’t going well due to the pandemic. During another eerily quiet night, Yūto sees someone he knew back from middle school in Osaka, Nagisa Inoue. This is a shock, as Nagisa is supposed to have committed suicide by jumping onto the train tracks. As she and Yūto get drinks together, Nagisa explains her devious plot to flee from the grasp of her overbearing mother, which was far from a victimless crime. Yūto is no saint himself, and he inadvertently reveals why he immediately recognized someone he never talked to when they were classmates.

Romansu (ロマンス☆) is about a bored housewife named Yuri who develops a serious online gambling addiction of an unusual nature. Yuri hasn’t been able to find a new job since she left her previous position to give birth to her daughter, and the pandemic isn’t helping. She channels her frustration into a food delivery app called Miideri, which she treats like a gacha game. Will the person who makes her next delivery be one of the handsome men rumored to be employed by the service? While gambling on the slim possibility that a prince will arrive at her door bearing a bag from McDonald’s, Yuri attracts the unwanted attention of an unhinged delivery driver who has read exactly the wrong message into her frequent orders.

Rinkō (憐光) is narrated by the ghost of a high school student named Yui who, strangely enough, can’t recall how she died. Having materialized back into the world fifteen years after her death, Yui finds herself confused and alienated by the loneliness of the Tokyo streets and train stations during the pandemic. She therefore returns home to her mother’s house in the country. Her arrival coincides with a memorial visit from her friend Tsubasa, who is accompanied by their old homeroom teacher, Sugita. As Yui eavesdrops on their conversation, she learns that she died after mysteriously falling into a river during a rainstorm. Sugita knows what Yui was doing and where she was going, and Tsubasa wants him to know that she knows, too.

The collection takes a slightly more positive turn in the fourth story, Tokubetsu enkosha (特別縁故者), in which Kyōichi, the unemployed and impecunious father of a young son, attempts to weasel himself into the good graces of an elderly man whom he suspects is a money hoarder. Kyōichi, an affable himbo who has no business scamming anyone out of money, volunteers for the daily task of picking up a takeout lunch from one of the many bentō stores in the neighborhood. The old man knows exactly why Kyōichi approached him, and he resents him for not pursuing his ambition to enter the food service industry. Harsh words are exchanged; but, when push comes to shove, even a relationship built on ulterior motives is better than living alone as an elderly shut-in during a pandemic.

Shukufuku no uta (祝福の歌) is about a happily married middle-aged man facing a new direction in his life. Despite being a high school student, his daughter is pregnant, and she intends to keep the baby. Meanwhile, the man’s mother seems to be entering the permanent brain fog of senile dementia. His daughter, who has been gossiping with the other mothers in her grandmother’s apartment building, gets the sense that there’s something else going on. With any luck, it’s a problem that can actually be solved.

Sazanami Drive (さざなみドライブ) follows the IRL meetup of five people who connected on Twitter after their lives were disrupted by the pandemic. As they drive out to the country in a minivan, they share their stories of abandonment and alienation. Little do they know that one of their number has a secret agenda. He’ll do whatever it takes to disrupt the group’s grim plan for the trip – and hopefully save their lives in the process.

As indicated by the book’s title, the two themes guiding this collection are “crime” and “the pandemic.” Each of the characters is hiding something, and the reader never knows where anyone’s true intentions lie. Michi Ichiho, who began her writing career as an author of BL romance novels, isn’t unduly focused on creating mimetic fiction, and the scenarios are improbable at best. Still, the twist at the end of each story is a lot of fun, and the fantastical plot elements accurately convey the feeling of just how weird and unreal everything felt during the pandemic.

It appears that the English-language publication rights for this collection are currently up for grabs (more info here). Tsumidemic is a fast-paced and emotionally cathartic book, and it would benefit from a tone-sensitive translation that renders Ichiho’s dialogue-filled writing into snappy, Stephen King style prose. I hope someone picks it up.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Kathryn4 Comments

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the quiet end of the world. Despite its postapocalyptic setting, the story is gentle. The author’s background as a biology teacher shines through her writing as she imagines the diverse forms that humans and their societies might take in the far distant future.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is structured as a collection of fourteen stand-alone stories that gradually form a larger narrative, and the reader is encouraged to put together a history from bits and pieces of individual lives. We never see the full picture, however, and I imagine that assembling a concrete timeline would take careful detective work.

This isn’t a plot-driven story that can have “spoilers,” necessarily, but any description of the book’s premise is going to contain analysis and speculation. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is one of the most intriguing works of speculative fiction that I’ve read in years, and this is partially due to its fragmented structure. You may want to venture into the collection on your own before reading any reviews, this one included.

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Still with me? Let’s go!

Over the millennia, the number of people on the planet has steadily decreased, and the last remaining humans live in isolated settlements of various sizes. In order to ensure harmony, the settlements are discretely managed by “watchers” who have been cloned and genetically engineered to fulfil their duty. Unlike regular humans, watchers grow up in small communities with “mothers” that are all physical manifestations of the same AI.

Everyone takes this arrangement for granted, but their “normal” is not the same as ours. Whether a story is told from a first-person or third-person point of view, the reader can only see the world from a limited perspective. It can be difficult to understand what’s going on at first, but the opportunity to surf successive waves of strangeness is a major part of this book’s charm.     

My favorite story is “Testimony,” which is delivered as a statement to a watcher by one of the new phenotypes of humans to emerge from centuries of genetic isolation. A small number of people are born with the ability to photosynthesize, and the joy they take from the sunlight and changing seasons affects their behavior in surprising ways. If enlightenment exists, these people have attained it; and honestly, it sounds really nice.             

Not all of the future human phenotypes are so peaceful or self-assured, however, and other stories have a bit more conflict. Still, with one notable exception, there’s no violence in this book. If there are wars and explosions, they happen entirely offscreen. Like the watchers and mothers, it’s the reader’s job simply to observe the biology, ecology, and culture of the future.

On the front cover of the American edition, Kawakami is billed as the author of People from My Neighborhood, a loosely connected series of magical realist flash fiction that’s an excellent comparison for Under the Eye of the Big Bird. To me, Under the Eye of the Big Bird also feels like a natural development of Kawakami’s debut short story, Kamisama, in which the narrator has a lovely afternoon picnic with a literal bear. The bear, being a bear, is clearly nonhuman, but no one seems to be bothered by this. The same casual acceptance of difference pervades Under the Eye of the Big Bird, which invites the reader to imagine the mundane everyday reality of the final days of the human race.

I’ll admit that I felt the chilling touch of existential dread at a few points during the book; but, as in any encounter with real difference, this initial sense of discomfort is important. The gentle strangeness of Under the Eye of the Big Bird encourages the reader to confront their biases, and it also lends weight to the narrative theme of human extinction. Instead of presenting the apocalypse as a standard dystopian superhero story, Kawakami allows the reader to take all the time and space they need to consider whether it would really be so horrible if the people we currently think of as “human” were to slowly disappear from the earth.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a book about the end of the world, but it’s also one of the kindest and most hopeful works of speculative fiction I’ve had the pleasure to read. Reading this book for the first time was a unique experience, but the impact of its stories linger even after their novelty fades.

A Hundred Years and a Day

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In October 2024, Matt Alt published an article in Aeon titled “The Joy of Clutter.” Instead of decrying the unsightliness of visual complexity, Alt argues that clutter has its own unique beauty, “an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.”

Alt’s essay is illustrated with photos contributed by Lee Chapman, who captures evocative images of the chaotic interiors of tiny family-owned restaurants located in shopping arcades lined with shuttered storefronts. Chapman’s photos coincide with a trend on social media that expresses nostalgia for the Japan of the late twentieth century, with posts often tagged as “Shōwa Retro.”

Tomoka Shibasaki’s A Hundred Years and a Day delights in the aesthetic of gentle decline exemplified by Shōwa Retro, and the 34 stories in the collection express nostalgia for people and places left behind in the past. Shibasaki invites the reader to walk through depopulated residential neighborhoods and stroll along abandoned shopping arcades. Half-empty cityscapes are dotted with buildings filled with clutter. Aging adults sift through the belongings of their deceased parents. Siblings who’ve drifted apart make clumsy attempts to reconnect by alluding to half-forgotten memories. Students study and then discard the small artifacts of the people who came before them.

Even reading through the book’s Table of Contents is like flipping through a card catalog in an old library, with each story’s title being a concise description of its premise. To give an example, the first story is titled:

“One summer during a long rainy spell, student number one from class one and student number one from class two discover mushrooms growing in a flower bed next to a covered walkway at their school; two years after leaving school they bump into each other, but after that, ten years pass, twenty years pass, and they don’t meet again”

“One summer” is a translucently beautiful piece of writing with imagery so clean and clear that I could almost feel the seasonal humidity on my skin. The story conveys the delicate specificity of a single moment captured in time. The moment dissipates and disperses as the world moves on, but the memory lingers.

An intriguing play on this theme is in the nineteenth story…

“I feel like I want to see the places that someone else saw, he said; I like thinking about places I’ve been to once but no longer know how to get to, or places that you can only access at certain times, I feel like there must be some way of visiting the places that exist only in people’s memories”

…which is about a woman who travels to a small seaside town to give a presentation at an academic conference. While walking back from the local shrine, she has a brief conversation with a child who will be the last ever student to graduate from the municipality’s junior high school. Years later, the child (now grown) encounters an artistic diorama that recreates a fictional version of their hometown that appeared in an old novel written by the academic’s deceased mother. While studying the artwork, this person (referred to by the story as “the last child”) is surprised by the liveliness of the reconstructed memory:

The last child crouched down and peered into the alley running between the wooden houses. It looked a lot like the alleyways that they knew from their childhood. They felt as though it was a path they’d been down before. As the last child was still staring down the passage, a cat ran across the alleyway where the stone steps were. The last child gasped in surprise, and stood up. A cicada flew in through the window, attached itself to the wall, and began to screech.

“I feel like I want to see” is a wandering ramble across time and memory, but most of the vignettes in A Hundred Years and a Day are much more focused on the history of a specific place. One of my favorites is the twenty-second story…

“A man opens a café in a shopping arcade, dreaming that it will become like the jazz café he used to frequent as a student; the café stays open for nearly thirty years, then closes down”

…which, despite the title, is about the young woman who takes over the original café by the university. The interior of the café is almost comically outdated, as are the records left behind by the previous owner. The new owner isn’t familiar with the musicians whose posters still hang on the walls. Regardless, the café is still lively, and the new owner finds herself thinking, at the end of the story, that “this is what I wanted to do.”

If I had to guess, I’d say that the reason why this sort of Shōwa Retro story has such a strong appeal is because it rejects the performative glossiness of mass media while embracing the beauty of real, everyday settings. The aesthetic also disrupts the modern myth that progress is not just desirable, but inevitable. Things don’t always get “better,” Shibasaki demonstrates, nor do endings always happen with a bang. 

A cursory reading might suggest that Shibasaki is trafficking in low-effort cultural nostalgia, but I don’t think that’s the case. The imagery presented by each story in A Hundred Years and a Day feels very deliberate, like it’s smashing a smartphone screen with a hammer. This is fiction to be enjoyed slowly, and I appreciate the contemplative space Shibasaki has opened for the reader.

When discussing the texture of Shibasaki’s writing, it’s important to acknowledge the artistry of Polly Barton’s English translation. Japanese literary writing is notorious for its nested sentence structure, which can feel unintentionally Proustian if translated literally. It takes a keen eye and a delicate touch to understand whether Japanese sentences are interminably lengthy because the language is simply written like that; or whether a sentence like one of Shibasaki’s story titles is a deliberate stylistic choice. Barton has done truly amazing work with A Hundred Years and a Day at a sentence-by-sentence level, allowing the reader to enjoy Shibasaki’s distinctive style while still maintaining a casual, conversational tone.

Most of the stories in A Hundred Years and a Day occupy fewer than ten pages, and they read like accounts passed from one person to another by word of mouth. Spending time with this collection feels like calling an elderly relative and listening to them talk about a restaurant closing in your old neighborhood, or about how they saw someone that you once knew as a child in the newspaper. There’s no real beginning or end to the stories, nor is there any discernible sense of structure. Still, the theme of human connection runs through Shibasaki’s work like a gentle current, drawing the reader forward along on the steadily flowing stream of time.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to Stone Bridge Press, which provided an advance review copy of this book. A Hundred Years and a Day will be published on February 25, 2025. You can learn more and read a preview on the book’s webpage (here).

Mimi ni sumu mono

Kathryn2 Comments

Yoko Ogawa’s 2024 short story collection Mimi ni sumu mono (耳に棲むもの) is about quiet endings and the unremarked deaths of small things. The tone of these five stories ranges from gentle and elegiac to genuinely shocking.

I’d like to begin with the latter, as Kyō wa kotori no hi (今日は小鳥の日) is one of the most subtle yet surprising horror stories I’ve read in some time. The nameless narrator of this story addresses the reader directly as she welcomes us to the annual gathering of the Small Bird Brooch Society. Small bird brooches can be made in a variety of ways, she explains, but she crafts hers using the real beaks and talons of dead birds. There’s something truly sublime about watching their tiny bodies decay, she muses.

The narrator then explains how her predecessor, the first president of the Society, met his untimely end. His death involves the still-living bodies of small birds, but I dearly wish it did not. After recounting one of the more gruesome scenes I’ve encountered in literary fiction, the narrator cheerfully invites the reader to sit down and enjoy the banquet. She then points out a few notable members of the Society, each of whom has their own method of constructing small bird brooches. Perhaps you, dear reader, will feel right at home in their company.

The collection’s final story, Senkōsho to rappa (選鉱場とラッパ), is about a young boy who lives with his mother in the company housing of a rural ore processing plant. His mother works both the day shift and the night shift at the plant’s cafeteria, leaving him to his own devices. During the summer festival at a local shrine, the boy becomes enamored with a toy bugle offered as a prize at a carnival game. Without any money to play, he’s reduced to lurking at the corner of the tent and praying that, if he can’t win the bugle, then no one else does either.

The next day, the boy takes out his frustration on a stray dog begging for scraps near the back entrance of the cafeteria where his mother works. He kicks the poor animal so hard that he ruptures its stomach, and it dies. Later he returns to the festival, where he witnesses the sudden death of the old woman running the carnival game. He steals the bugle in the confusion and returns home only to realize that the toy is nothing more than cheap plastic that has been spraypainted gold. In his shame, the boy buries the bugle in a closet, just as he buried the dog he killed between the roots of an old tree.

Still, as he sits on the apartment balcony while waiting for his mother to come home, the boy fashions constellations from the lights of the processing plant and imagines the songs he would play in their honor if his bugle were real.

Mimi ni sumu mono reminds me of Ogawa’s first work to appear in English translation, The Diving Pool (2008). Although it’s difficult to classify these stories as “horror,” they’re all subtly but effectively unsettling. When we’re exposed to the small cruelties that hide in the hearts of normal people, we begin to see reflections of their inner darkness in the details of the world that surrounds them. Ogawa’s characters are people who have lost their sense of belonging. The world has moved on without them, leaving a quiet air of desperation and neglect in its wake.

Mimi ni sumu mono is twenty-first century gothic fiction at its finest, but it’s not all bleak. Like the boy in Senkōsho to rappa and the president of the Small Bird Brooch Society, Ogawa remains fascinated by the beauty that gleams through the horrors. At 132 pages, Mimi ni sumu mono is relatively slim, but I believe this collection’s brevity is to its credit. The book is like an art gallery that encourages the reader to take their time with each piece, lingering as long as they like without any pressure to rush forward.

Mimi ni sumu mono was written in collaboration with Koji Yamamura, an Academy Award nominated animator. Yamamura created the companion piece My Inner Ear Quartet, which is described as “a literary VR animated film with an interactive storyline” on its page on Steam (here). This interactive animation was showcased at a number of international animation festivals and won several awards in Japan and abroad. As Yamamura’s animation requires a VR headset to view, I can’t offer any comments, but its trailer on YouTube (here) and the expanded excerpt (here) suggest that Yamamura was successful in capturing the eerie tone and uncanny beauty of Ogawa’s stories.

とんこつ Q&A

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とんこつ Q&A collects four stories by Natsuko Imamura, the author of The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Each of these stories is built on a cute and wholesome premise that develops in a dark and strange direction.

The title story is about a woman with social anxiety who creates a written script to help her navigate her job as a server at a small diner called Tonkotsu. Her efforts are aided by the recently widowed owner and his young son, who teaches the narrator to speak in Osaka dialect like his late mother.

The narrator’s script gradually expands beyond professional dialogue into everyday pleasantries, and she ultimately becomes a ghostwriter for the diner owner’s new wife. This scenario seems like a perfect set-up for a sweet and gentle romantic comedy, but it gradually becomes more disturbing as the narrator cheerfully crafts the diner owner’s new wife into a living doll.  

The three other stories in the collection are about middle school bullies whose punishment is far worse than their crime, an aggressively clueless wife who gets away with murder, and a very sketchy coworker. Imamura’s prose is smooth but cuts like a knife, and the situations she crafts are never what they seem. I wouldn’t say that these stories have twist endings, necessarily, but the way their wholesome coziness slowly sinks into social horror is fascinating to watch.

Nails and Eyes

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Kaori Fujino’s Nails and Eyes collects a novella and two short stories whose crystal-clear prose is darkened by the shadow of creeping psychological horror. The theme of family lies at the heart of these stories, especially as it intersects with the fear that those closest to us may deliberately choose not to see obvious but unpleasant truths.

In the third story, “Minute Fears,” a woman named Mika plans to attend the wedding reception of a college friend. Since she’s started a family, Mika has rarely gone out on her own, and she’s been looking forward to the party. Her son Daiki begs her not to go, as he’s been disturbed by an urban legend surrounding a ghost rumored to haunt the local playground. After a brief struggle with Daiki, who doesn’t want to be left alone, Mika goes to the reception late and leaves early. When she comes home, Daiki confesses his fear of the ghost, and Mika resolves to take him to the playground herself to prove that the urban legend isn’t true.

Whether the ghost exists is left to the reader’s imagination. Instead, the true horror lies in the image of Mika dragging her terrified son into the night. Or perhaps, if your sympathies lie elsewhere, the horror is hidden in the homebound years that Mika has had to endure in order to care for her child while her friends enjoy their lives and careers in the outside world. 

The second story, “What Shoko Forgets,” is equally ambiguous yet just as disturbing. After a mild stroke, Shoko has been living in an elder care facility for almost half a year. Her family visits regularly, and she receives ample attention from the staff. A polite and energetic young man named Kawabata is especially gentle, and he seems to have a special fondness of Shoko.

There’s something strange about Kawabata’s behavior after dark, however; and, for some reason, Shoko finds herself thinking about sex in a way she hasn’t for years. It’s possible that there might be a connection between Kawabata and the man Shoko imagines lying next to her at night, but both her eyesight and her memory have grown hazy. In any case, it’s no use trying to explain her muddled thoughts about the situation to her daughter or granddaughter, who so kindly come to visit a forgetful old woman.

The collection’s centerpiece novella, “Nails and Eyes,” is narrated from the perspective of a young girl who lost her mother to an unexplained incident. Her father brings home his younger lover, and the narrator addresses this woman directly through the story. She recounts the minute details of the woman’s life, from her affair with a bookstore owner to her obsession with the home décor blog once maintained by the narrator’s mother.

The narrator also describes her own behavior as a child who has clearly been traumatized by her mother’s suicide but largely ignored by the adults in her life. The narrator refuses to be anywhere near the balcony where her mother died, and she sits in the corners of the apartment gnawing at her nails, which become serrated and sharp. To her credit, the woman responsible for the child’s care makes a clean break with her lover and begins to take a more active interest in her charge’s welfare. This change of heart comes too late, however, and the story ends with an incredibly upsetting psychological break.

To be clear: if you have phobias related to eyes and/or fingernails, this book might not be for you. 

At 140 pages, Nails and Eyes is easy to breeze through, especially in Kendall Heitzman’s smooth and weightless translation. Still, Fujino’s fiction rewards time and attention, as well as repeated readings. There are layers to her deceptively simple prose, and any one of these stories has the potential to generate multiple lines of speculation. Nails and Eyes is a fascinating and disquieting collection that will be appreciated by readers who enjoy literary short horror fiction like Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge and Mariana Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire.